Tutorial: Beaded Necklace Design

Hello hello! It's back to the regular schedule again, hooray! As promised, I come to you with my methods for designing beaded jewelry. Like I said last week, I've been beading for quite some time now (and beading well for at least a year or two!), so I have some insights to share on the subject of creating a necklace.

Now, the "tutorial" in the title is a little bit misleading, since I won't be showing you a specific technique or walking you through concrete steps that you must follow in order to get a nice finished product. Unlike knitting and crochet, there isn't really much of a technical barrier to making a simple beaded necklace. As long as you can string beads onto a thread and use a pair of pliers, you have the skills. The trick is in selecting and arranging the beads into a pleasing pattern in the first place, and that's not something I can teach you how to do step by step. There are, in fact, countless ways to make a beautiful finished product! With that in mind, I'll be showing you just one way: my way. Pick and choose ideas that you like from it, and I hope it'll help spark some beading creativity in you!

Enough of that exposition nonsense, though. Onwards, to crafting!

Most of my beading projects start with a seed idea. Maybe it's an outfit that I'm designing jewelry for, or a particular color palette I like, or a flower I thought was pretty. Oftentimes, though, it's a particularly interesting bead or pendant that I want to incorporate. For this project, I dug up a whole bunch of beads that looked like this:

Pretty, right? They actually came off of an old necklace I got at a garage sale. I have no idea where they come from, but I love the detailed, colorful flower on the black background. It was exactly what I needed for inspiration.

The reason I had taken the original necklace apart was that, while the beads were pretty, it was composed of all the same bead, just strung in a loop. There was no variety in size, shape, color, nothing. It made these beautiful beads look downright boring! I learned from this mistake and decided that I needed a set of beads that contrasted my focal beads, for variety. I settled on these gold-colored metal beads.

The different shape and different finish would lend some interest to the necklace, I hoped. And yet, these beads still had something in common, too: the flowers on the focal beads were outlined in gold, which matched the color of my contrast bead! Similarly, the contrast bead had some aging done to it that left a blackish patina in the crevices. So far, so good!

I was happy with just the two beads as the main notes in the necklace, but there was still a lot of space to fill. Some beaded jewelry is composed solely of large beads, but I prefer a more delicate style. And what else to use for that than seed beads?

Seed beads are minuscule and incredibly useful, so I tend to keep a lot around in these little plastic containers. For color choice, I used the focal bead as reference and took out any seed bead I could find that matched the colors of the focal bead. It ended up being quite a nice spread: that's the beauty of using an already-pretty item as your inspiration!

Now that I had all my components lined up, it was time to start thinking about the design in earnest. I knew I wanted to make a lariat necklace, which is a long, ropelike necklace with no clasp. Instead of latching it at the back of your neck, you wrap it a few times around your neck and let the ends dangle in front. Some lariats have a loop at one end to thread the other end through, while others might be tied or just left loose. I decided to go with the first option, and have one end of the strand terminate with a loop.

Since my lariat wasn't going to have a central pendant or anything, I started playing around with simple sequences of beads, laying them out on my workspace to get a feel for how they would look in a finished necklace. I ended up liking this quite a lot:

The 2:1 ratio of focal bead to accent bead keeps the focus on the focal beads, I think. I liked it in any case, so I kept it! The next step was to design the seed bead pattern to fill the space in between the larger beads. A single strand of seed beads looked too plain to me, so I decided to make a double stranded chain-type pattern instead. This took a little bit of fiddling around with to get right, though. First, I laid out seed beads just like I did with the larger beads.

Then, I got out a short length of thread and a needle and strung those beads on in that pattern. The two-by-two chain ended up looking a little too stilted and stiff for my tastes, though, so I tried again with a three-by-one chain and got much more pleasing results.

With everything planned out like this, I was just about ready to start when I had an idea. What if the size of the focal/accent beads tapered off at the non-loop end of the lariat so that it was easier to thread that end through the loop? I didn't have different sizes of my focal beads, though, so I dug around some more in my stash and came up with thematically similar surrogates.

Okay, now we're ready to start. With everything figured out like this, beading is very simple and actually quite a relaxing process. It goes by quickly once you have the pattern memorized, and I was at the end of my beads sooner than expected!

The far end needed no finishing whatsoever, but I still needed to secure the threads on the working end of the necklace and add a loop. To make the loop, I bent a gold-colored ring into shape and added a jump ring as a connector. Then, I just threaded the loose ends of the threads through a crimp bead and around the jump ring to attach it. If you don't know how to use crimp beads, there are plenty of resources out there. Suffice to say, it's an easy way of securing threads without having to make knots! The end of the necklace then looked like this.

And really, that was all there was left to do! Lariats are nice and simple that way: no need to worry about fiddly clasps falling breaking and spilling your hard work everywhere. I stuck the finished necklace onto my display bust to take a couple pictures.

And there you have it! This is basically how I make necklaces. Sometimes I use a bead board with curved ditches to lay out bead patterns, but other than that, you saw every trick I use. While you're certainly entitled to your own opinion about the end result, I personally like it a lot. So much so that I actually made a second identical necklace with the beads I had left over! I'm not sure what I'll wear it with: maybe it'll spice up an otherwise monochrome black outfit? The future is full of possibilities with this colorful piece!

What did you think of this pseudo-tutorial? Did you like seeing my thought process in detail, or was it a bit boring and rambly? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments! If people like this sort of thing, then I might do more of it for some of the other crafts where I don't follow a pre-made pattern. Regardless, I hope you enjoyed the break from yarn-craft as we move into summer. I'll be coming back to knitting, crochet, and the like shortly though, don't worry. Until then, stay crafty!

Mother's Day Magic

Okay, I think I'm back to my regular schedule for the foreseeable future. Thanks for bearing with me!

That's not what I'm here to talk about though. I'm here to talk about Mother's Day. You see, I happen to have a mother (a wonderful, supportive, intelligent, and kind mother to boot), and every year, I try to hand make something for her for Mother's Day. Sometimes it's a scarf, sometimes a hat or even placemats, but often, I turn to jewelry. I've been making beaded jewelry for her for a long time, you see, and so I'm rather practiced at making things she likes. Plus, I have approximately 100 million beads that need to be put to good use. After rummaging around in my collection, I settled on some beads that I thought would look good together.

First, these spiky translucent numbers. The holes are near one end, so they hang down like teardrops.

And second, these assorted lampwork beads. Most of them look different from one another, so they add a lot of interest and variety to anything they're a part of.


With those in hand, and a variety of seed beads, I got to work laying things out. I wanted something fairly simple, with only one string of beads, so it went quickly, and I was putting it together in no time. A little finishing with a clasp, and it was all done!

I think it has a bit of a fall feel with the warm colors and the leaf-shaped red beads! And fall is my mom's favorite season, so hopefully she likes it and wears it a ton!

In the same day, I also went ahead and made a couple other necklaces. If you're interested in my process for beading, I made notes of how I went about designing one of the pieces. So stay tuned and you'll see that soon!

"Woven" Warmth

Spring is well and truly here, but I'm still in winter-crafting mode. The chilly rains and dreary skies have me searching for projects that are warm, but not quite dead-of-winter-knits warm.

Which is to say, now is the perfect time to turn to thinks like fingerless gloves! I get cold fingers at the drop of a hat, so having a variety of hand coverings gets me all the way from October to April. I broke out some of my pattern books and found a prime candidate from Sock Yarn One-Skein Wonders. The pattern? "Woven" Fingerless Gloves by Laura Hein Eckel. They looked super cute, and quite easy. Exactly what I needed for some relaxing knitting after a busy day.

There was one problem I didn't consider though. I had no free sock yarn to make these mitts with. Everything I had was either reserved for another project, or too little to make two gloves with (and I did need two of them). I did have dk weight though...

It's not something I would recommend for a first or second project, but if you have a few projects under your belt, you can modify patterns for slightly different weights of yarn. Sometimes all it takes is moving up or down a few needle/hook sizes: check your gauge and see where you are.

If you can't get gauge with your new yarn, fear not. Measure what gauge you do have. With the power of math and this measurement, you can still make patterns work! The trick is to find the major measurements of the pattern, and adjust the number of stitches to match. Sometimes, patterns will tell you what these measurements are. A hat pattern might tell you that the circumference at the brim is 20 inches. How many stitches do you need then? Take your gauge, in the form of "X stitches per inch", and multiply it by the number of inches wide you need your piece to be. There's the answer! As long as you follow the major measurements (in both length and width), you should get the right shape. Lace, cable, and colorwork designs may need to be modified to reflect the new stitch count, but a strategic repeat added or removed usually takes care of the problem. Less shaped items (like hats, scarves, and fingerless mittens) are easier to modify than more complicated ones, of course, but with some trial and error you can modify almost every pattern.

(As a side note, please make your gauge swatch more than an inch long. The longer it is, the more accurate your assessment of gauge will be. Dividing the number of stitches in the row by the length of the row gives you the measurement of "stitches per inch".)

Well, that was a roundabout way to explain how I used DK yarn for a sock yarn pattern. The results turned out quite well I think!